Page 4025 - Week 14 - Tuesday, 22 October 1991
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I am alleged to have misled the house and the Estimates Committee by assuring that there would be no staff reduction in a certain area of the administration, and I say that I never gave that assurance. I say that with confidence. To the extent that there was a coordinated central attack on the Government in the Estimates Committee process, it was the attempt by Opposition members of all parties to focus in on the 250 administrative staff positions and to seek to trap Ministers into saying where there will be a reduction and where there will not be a reduction, whose job will go, whose job will not go, the names of the people whose job will go, the names of the people whose job will not go.
I appeared before the Estimates Committee over three days, from early in the morning till quite late at night. When I was repeatedly asked that question, I gave a very consistent answer. The very consistent answer was that there are 250 positions to be saved; and that that was a budget Cabinet decision. I said:
The process now is being undertaken between the Government at the agency level and the Trades and Labour Council and the individual unions to identify where those positions may come from and to go through the appropriate and proper redundancy procedures.
I am quoting now from page 290 of the Estimates Committee transcript relating to this program, but somewhat earlier than the incident in question. I said:
There simply is not a list in anyone's possession sitting in a safe or a bottom drawer listing the positions by name and number. That is not the way the process operates ... The bottom line at the end of this budgetary year is that there is $6m less in salaries for those administrative positions and those savings must be achieved.
Repeatedly, I was asked the same question and repeatedly, to the chagrin of members opposite, I gave the same answer; that is, we did not know at that stage, on 8 October and on other days, what positions would be looked at as savings options. What we knew was that some 250 positions would have to be saved, and there was a process going on, which involved consultation with the unions, to look at possible savings throughout a range of areas.
In fact, I can now advise the house that, quite properly and consistently with what I have been saying, a letter had been sent by the executive director of the family services program on 1 October to the delegate of the Public Sector Union identifying that that might be an area where savings may occur and that there will be consultation. That was going on throughout the service.
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